Staging/Development Site Indexed?
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So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well.
I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site.
I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it?
Thanks for any help.
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Thank you both for your help!
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Hello there,
What James said is correct, but that will not prevent to be indexed again.
There is no need to redirect 301 the other versions of the site, if they are not usefull to google and users, just tell google to deindex them. Be carefull not o set a robots.txt and make those site uncrawable, because GoogleBot will never re-crawl those pages and understand that you want to remove them from the index.
Use Meta robots tag: in every page you want to be deindexed.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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